Facebook is probably the most popular social networking site right now.  It’s difficult to write a completely accurate tutorial on Facebook because it’s capabilities, structure and privacy schemes change regularly.  Essentially on Facebook you create a profile for yourself.  This can be as basic or as detailed as you want.  You can share information like your address, phone number(s), email address(es), birthday, school info, work info, religious and political views, who your family members are, books, music and movies that you like and your relationship status.  Also, you have a “wall” that you can post status updates (very similar to twitter), and people can post comments and things on your wall.  Since each person has their own profile, you can “friend” other people.  The term “friend” is a loose one.  For some people they are only “friends” with their actual friends.  For a lot of people on facebook, they are “friends” with just about anyone they have ever met, and sometimes people they have never met.

Pros:

Connection:
This is a GREAT tool for reconnecting with old friends, staying connected with your current friends, strengthening relationships with acquaintances (maybe someone you loosely know through work or school).

Photos:
You can share an unlimited number of photos VERY easily with lots of people, and tag people in the photos, so you can see who’s in each photo.

Events:
If you’re familiar with evite, this should be old hat for you.  With Facebook, you can create an event, fill in all the details like where, when and what type of event it is.  The best part of it is you can invite Facebook members to these events.   The invitation then shows up on the users admin page and they can respond to the invite with a “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”.  You can even allow invitees to invite other people or lock it down so that only the event creator has control.

Pages and Groups:
These are very similar and if you’re curious about the differences, check out the Facebook help page.  Organizations, movies, bands, actors, etc can create a group or fan page that users can join or become a fan of and keep track of what’s happening in that group or page.  The group/page admin can also send updates to the users, easily invite specific groups of people to events that they might enjoy or simply update the group/page with info to keep interested parties up to date.  ELEVATE has a fan page.

Cons:

Overshare:
As with just about any social networking site, it’s very easy to overshare.  If you post something on your wall, (depending on your privacy settings) all of your “friends” can see it.  In my experience, I’ve seen people share extremely personal things that should really only be shared with one or two people, but it’s share anyways.  Because there is no visible audience to get immediate feedback from, people tend to share as if there isn’t an audience.

Type and Amount of Shared Info:
Obviously, as it was mentioned before, with the breadth and depth of the information that one CAN put on their profile, people end up putting that information out there.  All someone has to do is “friend” someone on Facebook, and

Privacy Policy:
Also, a confusing thing about Facebook that can cause an unintentional exposure of information to a larger group of “friends” or even the world is the ever changing privacy policy.  Because of the potential dangers of available personal information, Facebook has been under fire almost every other day, it seems, to change their policy.  So because of this they are regularly revisiting and adjusting their policy.  The best way to find out about this is to simply go to their help center.

Applications:
Facebook has the option for installing third-party applications.  You can install things like games, calendar related tools, trivia, contests, quizzes, artistic tools, etc, etc, etc (and I mean “etc”).  The danger with these apps is that when you install them, they have complete access to ALL the information on your profile, whatever you might have put on there.  And while Facebook has a policy for how these apps run, they really have no way of enforcing this policy 100%.  Many apps are developed by hobbyists who either don’t care and/or have the ability to keep all your private data private.  So be careful with apps!  The best thing to do is remove the ones you don’t use.  Go to Account>>Application Settings and remove (click the “x”) those apps.